'Hobbs & Shaw' Is Dumb and Fun

In my review for The Fate of the Furious, I wrote:

“…most of the best scenes in the movie are those where Deckard or Hobbs or both are in.  They are so delightfully badass and witty, and the fight scenes they’re involved in – either against each other or with enemy thugs – are sheer testosterone awesomeness.  Statham and Rock have terrific screen chemistry, giving me somewhat a glimpse of the Heroes for Hire fantasy (with The Rock as Luke Cage and Statham as Iron Fist) I used to have.”

Well, apparently, the studio honchos also noticed that the pairing was a hit among fans, and being quick to capitalize as ever, they greenlit a spinoff movie that turned out being Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw or simply Hobbs & Shaw.

The film brings United States Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and ex-British-Special-Forces-turned-mercenary Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) together once again.  Still detesting each other due to their history, the two are forced to teamup when the world is threatened by a techno supervirus called “Snowflake.”  In the process, they must go against a cybernetically-enhanced super-soldier named Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), who is working for a mysterious terrorist organization called Eteon.

For a while now, Fast & Furious’ MO has been to double down on over-the-top elements with each new movie.  And it somehow makes it work!  Its evolution has been radical yet organic.  Never did the progressing ludicrousness prove detrimental to it.  On the contrary, it uses this to its advantage, as it helps keep everything fresh.  Fast & Furious has maneuvered itself to earn an “anything goes” identity; it can choose to be anything at this point – a heist film, a spy film, a buddy-cop film – and it won’t come off as desperate, unbelievable, or incongruous at all.  That’s why a franchise that started out from being about automobile hijacking and street racing can now have cyborg supervillains in its universe and no one bats an eye.

Hobbs & Shaw is exactly how I thought it would be: dumb and derivative, but fun and engaging.  It has a basic story, but it also has the heart, humor, and absurd, fantastical spectacles to keep it consistently interesting.

It functions with a lot of clichés taken from the “buddy cop” action comedy formula.  But the material still brims with entertainment value for Rock and Jason Statham are the ones working on it.  They carry the film, and their splendid chemistry overcomes the ridiculous writing nearly all the time.  They have some pretty corny dialogue here and there, and at the hands of a lesser duo, it would have bombed.  But with them, these banters are more enjoyable than they should have been.

The movie features a few surprise cameos.  But a cameo that I thought would happen didn’t happen.  I was kind of expecting (SPOILERS) the cyberterrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron) – the big bad of The Fate of the Furious – to show up.  I thought that, in the end, it would be revealed that Eteon’s faceless boss was Cipher.  However, the movie finished without revealing the identity of the Eteon boss.  I guess that’s left for another day.

Overall, Hobbs & Shaw is a worthwhile addition to the Fast & Furious franchise.  It’s not great, but it didn’t really need to be.  It just needed to stay true to the signature Fast & Furious theme of family as well as to the signature Fast & Furious no-holds-barred, will-throw-anything-to-the-screen-in-the-name-of-entertainment filmmaking philosophy – and it did.